Abstract
In his book, The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula writes about photographers traveling with the French colonial armies to Algeria, searching for women as they imagined them to be – sexually available and living in harems. What they found instead were women inaccessible to their photographic gaze. Undeterred, these photographers hired local women, staged sets in studios resembling the interiors of homes, in so far as even placing bars on windows “to produce a sense of imprisonment,” and photographed the women. The invented images were then produced as postcards to send back home to France. Alloula describes the images as representing the “Frenchman’s phantasm of the Oriental female.” He argues: “It is a mirror trick that presents itself as a pure reflection…it rests and operates upon a fake equivalency – namely that illusion equals reality. It literally takes its desires for realities.” This paper takes up this point, focusing on AI-generated images of Muslim women as the modern embodiment of the colonial postcard. I explore how AI image tools have a tendency to default to reductive, fantasy tropes of Muslim women, reflecting the Western gaze. For example, many Muslim women found that even after uploading photos of themselves wearing hijab (head covering), Lensa, an AI app, generated hypersexualized avatars, and in some cases, removing their hijab. I ook at the role AI plays in furthering the objectification and fetishization of Muslim women, and how imagined forms of AI aesthetics can have profound consequences for gendered Islamophobia.
Presenters
Sabah UddinAssistant Professor, Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Bowie State University, Maryland, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Images and Imaginaries from Artificial Intelligence
KEYWORDS
AI, Gendered Images, Muslim Women
